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Alden "Evoke" Mixing Tips (PT.3)
1.0 Stereo So what is "stereo"? Well, as you're probably acutely aware, you have a right and a left speaker to work with. Whether those speakers are conventional "speakers" like monitors, or whether they're strapped to your head like headphones, most of the time you're working with just the two. I'm not going to be covering surround sound or anything like that because frankly I have literally no knowledge that's relevant. A "mono" sound is one that plays the exact same signal on both speakers. That is to say that the left speaker's output is exactly identical to the right speaker's output. A "stereo" sound is any sound that is NOT mono. There's an important distinction here between width and stereo. A sound that is stereo is simply one that has different content on each speaker. You could put a kick in the left speaker and a hat in the right speaker and render them into one file, and you'd technically have a "stereo" sound. When somebody talks about a "wide" or "widened" sound, they're typically referring to a sound that would typically be mono (or too mono for the taste of the producer) and has been effected or layered such that the content on each speaker is different, while still maintaining the illusion that the sound is one cohesive entity. 1.5 Stereo In the overall mix of your song, you're probably used to a crude manipulation of the stereo balance known simply as panning. Panning is simply when the Left speaker is made to sound quieter than the Right speaker, or vice versa. Since this makes one signal different than the other, it will add to the stereo content of your mix. However, it has the added consequence of "unbalancing" that specific element in the mix. MOST of the time you will want prominent or focal points in your mix to be centered. It's typically better to pan out elements that are not attention-grabbing (like percussion, pads, vocal harmonies, etc.) while making a point of keeping focal or driving elements (like kicks, bass, leads, vocal lead melodies, or most electronic snares) in the center. There are exceptions to these rules, and–of course–trust your ears. For example, Noisia tends to center their snare in driving hard dnb tracks like "Dead Limit", but opts to pan their snare layers out when they're working with a mono vocal, as in their production of "Sloe Gin", for Dream McClean. Make a point of noticing where prominent elements fall in the stereo field in your favorite tracks, and try to imagine why they might be arranged as such. 2.0 Width As stated before, the definition of "widening" that I'll be using is as follows: widening is any process or effect that is designed to create stereo content in a sound without making it apparent to the listener that the stereo tracks are "different sounds". The reason for widening is simple: wider sounds will literally sound bigger and more real to the listener. There is–of course–a danger in over-widening. The best metaphor I've come up with compares sound design to sculpting. To paraphrase: "You may want your sculpture to be big, so people can marvel at how grandiose it is. However, you don't want the sculpture to be so big that you can't actually tell what it is." Keep in mind as you're adding more space and width to your sound that you can make it seem so large that it becomes impossible to fully perceive. 2.5 Width The main advantage to widening–as opposed to panning–is that it allows for the producer to maintain the center of the mix, while still creating an immersive and real sense of space for the listener to be in. Almost 100% of every sound you will want to use will have stereo content. Especially once you factor in the natural widening of room-verb, (which I personally apply to literally every element in my mixes using a send). Almost nothing in my mixes ends up mono when all is said and done. 3 Execution Okay, so you've got a pretty good grasp on why you should widen, and what you should widen, but HOW does one widen? Well, this is where it starts to get complicated, because there are SO MANY WAYS, each of which has their own unique limitations and drawbacks. Here's the sparknotes: • Chorus, Phaser, Flanger, Spread These are all variations on the same basic idea. They take your mono signal, duplicate it a bunch, and detune the duplicates, while also panning them out across the stereo field. Yes, it's WAY more complicated than I made it sound, but this is all you need to know from a practical standpoint. The main problem with this as a widening strategy is "phasing". Put simply, phasing is where the attempt to widen your signal ends up compromising the integrity of the mono signal, usually by creating spectral inconsistencies where the detuned layers intersect and cancel eachother out. Generally speaking, the more phasing you have, the less weight your mono signal will carry. For some sounds (particularly pads and other backing instrumentation) this won't matter at all. For others (especially low frequency instruments) it can totally ruin the sound. • Haas Effect, ADT, Stereo Micro-Delay - The basic principle here is that your mono signal becomes the signal of one speaker. It's then duplicated and delayed by an amount that does not register to the human ear as creating a separate sound, and played in the other speaker. IE: The right signal is the same as the left signal, but delayed 30 milliseconds. This method comes with the most problems. It's pretty much guaranteed to cause phasing in some form or another, because when you delay a signal by a finite amount like this, you're going to create many points where the peaks of one speaker directly contrast the valleys of the other speaker, creating the phase cancellation issue mentioned earlier. It also still does weight your sound toward the direction of the speaker that carries the undelayed signal, meaning it also fails a bit at not being panning. There are very few instances where I use this, though the dramatic nature of the effect can make it quite good for catching the listener off guard. • Short Reverb, Slapback Delay - I assume most people reading this are familiar with reverb and delay on a basic level. The important distinction here is that the decay times on the effects are kept quite low, so the reverb and delay often aren't recognized as such by the listener. Rather than allowing the tail of the effect to audibly ring out, it's kept short and sweet. High quality reverbs in particular can add a nice organic sense of space to whatever you apply them to. I use Valhalla Room, and know many producers that swear by it. The disadvantage here is the same as with any reverb/delay application. Adding this content to the sound will make it take up more space, both literally in time and figuratively in your mix. It's very easy to end up with too much reverb in a mix, so be cautious about your application. However, a good reverb plugin shouldn't create phase issues, and there are many delay plugins (Like xfer Dimension Expander) that are designed to "cancel in mono", which helps maintain the integrity of your main signal. I've often heard it said: the best room verb is one that is only noticed when it's gone. • Layering and panning -When I first heard about this method, it blew my mind with how simple it was. Let's say you're working with a saw lead, and you've got the tone on the patch sounding just the way you want it. There's only one problem: it's in mono. Well, if you simply make an additional two copies of the synth and pan one all the way left, and the other all the way right, you can make small (sometimes imperceptible) changes to each, and you've just created a wider sound. Small adjustments to distortion gain, oscillator tone, wavetable positioning, or envelope values between the 3 layers can widen your sound, while typically avoiding almost any of the pitfalls of any of the other methods I mentioned. So long as the left channel is different than the right, you're working with a stereo sound. If you don't change the panned layers so drastically that it makes it clear to the listener that it's a different sound on the left than it is on the right: you're widening. Definitely try this out, and get creative with it. Just don't forget to make sure your content in mono is still strong.